It’s like Codepen and JSFiddle for React Native…Just head over to https://sketch.expo.io and start typing. You can either preview the component on the emulator inside the browser, or open it directly on your device with the Expo app.

evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that’s been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e.g. Atari/MuJoCo), while overcoming many of RL’s inconveniences.

ES is an algorithm from the neuroevolution literature, which has a long history in AI and a complete literature review is beyond the scope of this post. However, we encourage an interested reader to look at Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Jürgen Schmidhuber’s review article (Section 6.6). The work that most closely informed our approach is Natural Evolution Strategies by Wierstra et al. 2014. Compared to this work and much of the work it has inspired, our focus is specifically on scaling these algorithms to large-scale, distributed settings, finding components that make the algorithms work better with deep neural networks (e.g. virtual batch norm), and evaluating them on modern RL benchmarks.